Land Use and Land Cover Change as a Driver of Urban Heat Island Intensity: A Spatio-Temporal Geographic Analysis

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22659657

Deepak (Independent Researcher, Geography, Hisar, Haryana)

The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is one such major geographical phenomenon of urbanization which is caused due to the fast and often unplanned changes in Land Use and Land Cover (LULC) that affect the thermal regime of cities vis-a-vis the surrounding countryside. Despite its cause of heat radiation and absorption in the city, the spatial distribution, intensity, and temporal behavior of Urban Heat Island can only be explained geographically in terms of land uses and urban settlement forms. The present review will look at the connection between LULC change and Urban Heat Island Intensity (UHII). This will include the research on LULC-induced urban heat island effects through remote sensing, GIS and spatiotemporal techniques. The review will consider how converting the natural landscape to an artificial built-up environment impacts the surface energy balance leading to local warming of the area depending on the scale of the city and other climatic factors. The research will also include some methods of detecting UHI phenomena used by geographers, such as satellite-based land surface temperature (LST) assessment, LULC analysis, and multi-decadal time series comparison. It will discuss the importance of spatial planning in mitigating Urban Heat Island effects rather than relying on engineering solutions.